Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Erica Ross is composing an 'About Us' page at her website: Dance Our Way Home. She asked me to contribute. I share only to encourage you to go, browse and pour over her site, its beauty.

“I've known Erica for many years and witnessed her blossoming into the teacher she is today. Her dance sessions incorporate the power of mythology to give us direction in our transformations through the mystery and magic of our own rhythms, the creativity we call on in our lives. Erica's DOWH sessions are always well researched, and carefully planned with open dance, partner exercises, a flow between movement and resting while Erica guides our visions towards integrating a greater whole within ourselves, in the relationships in our lives, our harmony with the forces of the universe. It is her loving care for the gentle and deep nurturing of women, our often fraught and splintered self-images and connections in an ever-changing world, in a safe and welcoming space that drew me to her Dance Our Way Home practice. In this practice I have found compassion and a celebration of us, as we are, as well as support for who we would like to become, the realization of our dreams.”

Brenda Clews, Writer, Artist

Brenda Clews is a poet and painter living in Toronto, Canada. Born in Zimbabwe, and having spent a childhood in the jungles of Zambia, she embraces the dance of shamanic healing that DOWH offers. She is a developmental editor, a tutor, a certified Kundalini yoga instructor. Published in literary journals, her work shown in art shows, she is developing an aesthetic of multiplicities, of our beings as prisms, in which dance is a central metaphor for living and understanding our lives. Read Brenda's poem "Bramble Rose" and writing "Erica's Dance Our Way Home". A small videopoem she created after the Solstice Ecstatic Dance in June 2009 may be seen on her Celestial Dancers page of her website, Art & Writings.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

A Globe & Mail series, forthcoming through the next week. I found the first two disturbing, painful. Life is not just worse than ever for women in Kandahar, but life-threateningly dangerous. How, after the short period of optimism and hope, some shedding of the burka for the veil, bravely venturing out to schools, to work, did things turn back into a life that the women say is worse than that under the Taliban? Then there was 'a reason' for the attacks & torture, now there isn't - just a whole city become psychopath. Scary. Sad. Tragic.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

You can download this album for free if you wish. It carries a Creative Commons License.

Profound experimental music for inner journeys...

A large vision. I listened to 30 sec of the first track last night and downloaded without reading the notes. This morning, out with the dog in the morning air, I listened.

And I thought how far some of our musicians have moved from 'traditional' music, though I was not thinking of the Orient but of the European concert. Melody and rhythm don't exist in this album in the traditional sense.

There is a beat, but it is organic. As if we are moving through a deep underground cave. Echoes. Stalagtites. Distant water where diving is so deep as to be depthless. Strange sea creatures in those black waters of the lakes in the underground caves. Ecstatic diving, bubbles, cool pure water.

As we move through the dark cool chambers of the cave, its damp limestone walls, light cascades in occasionally. Ebullient. Nourishment for our earthbound bodies.

The woman singing is ethereal, like a Greek siren calling, or an angel healing, she is both, and a vocaloid who is aesthetically crafted.

We move through Nyx as if in a movie. I felt an archetypal narrative unfolding in my depths. The "Primordial goddess of the night"... wow! Yes! I felt her, strongly, in my first listening, before referring to the notes.

The drums throughout hold everything together for me. They are my link to traditional music, tribal music, and the power of the Orient beats here too.

Fukataku's drumming anchors the subterranean journey of this soundscape. This soundscape in 6 sections - organic sonic world of strange sounds and energies and things sweeping, by, close, far, ebulliently, darkly, it's almost a ghost world, and yet more primal than that. The human and the animal and the synthesized all co-alesque in this deeply mythological, archetypal music that is ambient and trance and has flavours of traditional Japanese music which takes the listener through a deep inner journey in the dark and mysterious places of the soul.

Photo of cave from David Darling._________________________________From Nyx's album notes:

Album description

The primordial goddess of the night. Dark ambient atmosphere with Miku-dub.

Notes on tracks:

1) Melisma singing of the vocaloid Miku in the eastern Asia flavor.2) Electric ambient dub in three parts with vocaloid's chant.3) A dub version segued from the previous track.4) Aether is the elemental god of the "Bright, Glowing, Upper Air." Minimal sequence of electric piano diverges.5) Nyx, the goddess of the night, appears from the bottom of dark ancient Chaos. Based on a session with Fukataku, the drummer.6) A short sketch in five. The vocaloid Miku sings the last one verse to fade out.___

Grünemusik is the name of a unit owned by hikaru (nankado). He's been publishing experimental-pop tunes since 2000 in Japan.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

I didn't like what I wrote, so didn't post daily as I thought I'd do, and didn't write more... But that's how it is. Writing emerges in the way it emerges. While we can shape it a bit, mostly we have to accept what is manifesting. Trust it. The artist stands aside to let the work emerge in its fullness. Are we guardians of the creative impulse? Gatekeepers. Filters. Beacons. That which flows through us, from our fingers, in our words, or the strings of our instruments, or the brushes we hold full with paint, through our heartminds. We struggle to give form to our visions, yes. It's work, yes. But we still have to stand aside to allow the shining.

What I wrote, which didn't please me:

Less is more. I forget this on the short ride in the elevator.

The self is contained in its demeanor.

The demeanor in the business suit in the high security corporate world in the role. It is professional, underplayed. Wealth glitters everywhere in diamond rings, Rolex watches, talk of trips, events. Hinted. Happily. Less is more; more is more; a code for what is secure, safe.

A way of sitting, like a bird on a branch, sleeping. Upright. Aware, awake, lucid dreaming.

Faint etchings of the body on the back of the eyelids, like bird scratchings. Strange, thin stick things in suits.

In the park at lunch, a man shouting, furious anger. People placidly watching. His emotion rises like a maniacal tide in him and unfurls spitting salt on the other man, who stands before him.

And again, he is asked to re-do the scene.

The park, lunchtime strollers, people sitting, birds pecking crumbs from the ground, fountain spraying into the air, sun, the film crew at a distance, the camera like a voyeur, the actors alone on the path, a light held by someone, a reflector by another.

That emotion found in his depths, brought curling in fury to the surface and spitting out his mouth.

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Even if I am working full-time, have kids, a dog, a cat, too busy, too tired, etc etc, I'm considering beginning a "found poem" of my days. Crazy, packed writing. Allowing impressions to form words that form thoughts and images. Keeping a tiny notebook, smacking keys at lunch on my netbook, buying a new Nano iPod with a voice recorder to record impressions; however I can do it, doing it. Letting it grow in its own unpruned ways. Snippets. Definitely snippets. Trusting the heartmind. Trusting the instinct to poetry. Snippets of what the intellect is grappling with. What the senses are detecting. The poetries of living. Awkward sometimes. Knowing other times. Ambiguities. Allowing the heartmind its impressions, the way we feelthink. Not superseding the raw data of living with a determination to present a nice face with nice smiling theories (though some days are like that), and certainly with no "lesson" to teach (never, it's make your own), no agenda. Not trying to show it's a good world, or a bad one. Or that there is an answer at all. And then again, some days there is, and it seems to click and work. Allowing.

Sunday, September 06, 2009

I want to save how we have developed while I revert back, delete the versions, the revisions, to the origins. To come to first appearance, where the hesitant beginnings are, to re-discover the faint sketch of what is to come. To undo backward to the untouched data as it would display itself now to my worldly eye. To find the first uncut, un-enhanced, unedited draft. Where it is unfocussed and unformulated. Before the narratives tidy it up. Where we dangle freely, a cluster of possibilities.

Thursday, September 03, 2009

I sit in a sculpture that is architecture. White-painted iron arches and ribs repeat over the walkway like a riot of infinite regressions in a mirror. Distorting glass windows over the archways bounce light and reflect the architectural columns in permutated ways. Looking at the rounded arch of white ribs through the glass which is divided into sections by frames it feels as if we’re in the skeleton of an old boat, itself a rendition of a ribcage lit from within the belly of a whale, a huge beast basking in the sun pouring through the glass sky as it rolls through the waves.

The sound of French café music, slightly jazz, sensual, romantic, and a fountain spraying, pouring add to the surreal experience.

Rich forkful by forkful I eat a Napoleon, vanilla cream custard, flake pastry, fresh strawberries, with a smooth yet bitter coffee. My dessert swims in its vanilla cream on a large platter on an outdoor iron table and I am seated in a wicker chair that rests on a floor of polished field stone tiles. Large planters holding Ficus trees and other foliage line the edge of the patio - like a street café in Valencia, or any cosmopolitan European city. There are green and red and yellow canvas umbrellas over some of the tables.

Is this decoration, or does it serve a purpose in the glass-filtered sun? The sun that makes my netbook screen almost impossible to clearly see. The same dancing light is on my lap. I take cell phone photographs.

An old bank building, in restored condition, is one of the buildings inside the glass structure and which you pass as if you were walking down a pedestrian-only street. Once it was whipped by winds and ice or baked in the hot Summer sun, now it dwells within a light-filled architectual sculpture. Is this a futuristic rendition of the bubbles that might contain our cities of the future? The old building stands without mourning the loss of rain or windborne air, as if realizing a dream of a protected and peaceful existence.

We walk past the building from another century over glass squares of radiating light.

About Me

BRENDA CLEWS is a poet, painter, dancer, video-maker, mother, friend, muse, mystery-maker, a lover, a solitary, believer in divine sybaritism. 'While we all have an instinctual sense of what 'art' is, it's from a 'Weltanschauung' that is itself art because it is part of the process of conscious life in a world that is a work of art.

Our universe's creativity is beyond our wildest imaginings.'

Brenda was born in Zimbabwe in the then small mining town of Chinhoyi. When she was two her father, D. Richard Clews, who was a geologist, moved her and her mother to Kafue National Park in Zambia, then the largest game park in Africa, as he joined a mining team looking for copper, and where her two brothers were born.

She cites her early years spent in the jungle, barefoot, living in a compound of mud huts, with many wild animals and the wonderful Ndembu people for her deep resonance with the beauty, strangeness and brilliance of the tribal mind and the natural world.

After the time in the jungle came a year in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, and then her father took the family to England where he obtained a doctorate in Geochemistry and accepted a position in Canada. Brenda has lived in Canada since then.

Brenda has a full-length collection of poetry, Tidal Fury, with Guernica Editions, 2016. She has a forthcoming novella, Fugue in Green, with Quattro Books, 2017. LyricalMyrical Press published her chapbook, the luminist poems, in 2013. She hosts Poetry & Music Salons in Toronto.

She has edited university textbooks and creative writing, taught writing, written articles for newspapers, taught Kundalini Yoga, done temporary office work, and dog sitting, while maintaining a reclusive lifestyle of writing and painting. She raised two wonderful children as a single mother. She has a degree in Fine Arts and abandoned a PhD in English Lit many years ago.

Brenda has had solo art shows at York University (2000), Q Space (2013) and Urban Gallery (2014), and been in a number of group art shows including 'Birthtales' (1992) at A Space, 'Birth2' (2004) at Ayer Lofts in the US, '5 By 5' (2013) at The Gladstone Hotel, Yellow House Gallery (2014), SuperWonder Gallery (2016) and Arcadia Gallery (2016). Her artwork has appeared in 'Addiction to Perfection' and as two journal covers and in a poster for ‘ARM Magazine.’

Her poetry has been published in print journals, like 'Tessera,' and 'ARM Journal,' and on-line at sites, including 'Qarrtsiluni,' 'Mothers Movement Online,' and 'The Browsing Corner' (she is not good at submitting her work). She presented papers yearly at conferences at York University and OISE on the maternal body from 2001-2006. Her video poetry has been featured at 'CrossBridge' (an international multidisciplinary journal), and 'Moving Poems ('best poetry videos on the web').

She is a multi-media artist whose approach to a topic may include poetry, painting, theory, dance, recordings, and video. Brenda's oeuvre focuses on the plethora, the multiple callings, the obsessive muse, the prism rather than the spotlight, or on multiple spotlights. She writes, "Where else do you flee? How do you combine yourself?"